Word.ws English Dictionary

inclusive fitness

inclusive fitness noun: the number of offspring equivalents an individual rears, rescues or otherwise supports through its behavior (regardless of who begets them).

Noun

inclusive fitness

  1. (evolutionary theory) the number of offspring equivalents an individual rears, rescues or otherwise supports through its behavior (regardless of who begets them).

Origin of inclusive fitness

Coined by W. D. Hamilton in his 1964 paper "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour".

Questions about inclusive fitness

What does inclusive fitness mean?
Inclusive fitness means the number of offspring equivalents an individual rears, rescues or otherwise supports through its behavior (regardless of who begets them).
What part of speech is inclusive fitness?
Inclusive fitness is a noun.

Words near inclusive fitness in the dictionary

  1. inclusionists
  2. inclusions
  3. inclusive
  4. inclusive disjunction
  5. inclusive disjunctions
  6. inclusive fitness
  7. inclusive or
  8. inclusive ors
  9. inclusively
  10. inclusiveness
  11. inclusivenesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inclusive fitness (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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